Page 42

One word. Clear as a bell. Permanent.

A pause. Then, softer: “No, of course. I know how many people applied. I know what this means…”

There was no place in that conversation where I would fit. A bear arborist in Screaming Woods didn’t understand tenure. It understood mine.

Beneath my skin, my bear shifted—a low, dense pull toward the caves, toward the dark, toward the place where the ground closed over you and nothing got out.

Den. Take her under. Keep.

The spade handle cracked under my grip.

I put it down the way I’d put down a limb about to fall on someone—fast, before it hit anything. Kneeling in the dirt, I pressed both hands flat against the soil until the tremor moved through my fingers and into the ground.

She returned while I was washing the tools at the outdoor tap.

“Just the department,” she said, pocketing her phone. Her mouth opened, shaped the start of a word, then closed.

I dried my hands on a towel that smelled like her shampoo. Underneath that scent was adrenaline, and something I’d never caught on her before.

Guilt.

“Breakfast?” I asked.

“Great idea. I’m starving.”

We ate at the kitchen table. Bread, eggs, the last of the honey. She talked about the weather changing. I agreed that it was. She asked if my back was sore from the digging. I said it was.

She started to ask something else, then changed her mind and buttered another piece of bread instead.

Both things were true. Neither mattered.

I watched her tear the crust off the bread the way she always did and set it in a neat pile on the edge of her plate. I’d eaten her crusts every meal. She hadn’t noticed. If she noticed today, she wasn’t going to say.

When she finished, I took her plate before she could stand, rinsed both under the tap, and set them on the rack. The kitchen was quiet except for the stove ticking and a magpie outside, warbling like it had an audience.

Neither of us said anything. We didn’t talk about the important things. And when I left the room, she didn’t ask where I was going.

She was snappish all afternoon.

At three, she complained about the way the kettle whistled. At four, she found a moth in the pantry and told it, out loud, that this was not what she needed today. At five, she said the light over the kitchen table was too hard on her eyes—and when I offered to fix it, she got angrier for reasons she didn’t explain.

By six, she’d spent twenty minutes sorting the same three collection envelopes.

I was pretending to sharpen a grafting knife at the end of the table. The blade had been done for ten minutes. She picked up an envelope, turned it over, tapped it against the table twice, and put it down.

I could read people the way I read trees. Over time you learned to see when a plant was leafing hard on the outside because something inside was frightened.

She was leafing hard.

“These are filed wrong,” she said. “The dates are out of order on half of them.”

“They aren’t.”

“And the labeling system we agreed on is completely inconsistent, which is going to make the write-up⁠—”

“The labeling system is fine.”

“It is not fine, Barrett, there are at least four⁠—”